THE (HONEST) TRUTH - Weebly

1 THE ( honest ) TRUTHABOUT DISHONESTYHow We Lie to Everyone Especially OurselvesDAN ARIELYD edicationTo my teachers, collaborators, and students, for making research fun and to all the participants who took part in our experiments over the years you arethe engine of this research, and I am deeply grateful for all your PageDedication INTRODUCTION: Why Is Dishonesty So Interesting?From Enron to our own misbehaviors .. A fascination with cheating .. Becker s parking problemand the birth of rational crime .. Elderly volunteers and petty thieves.

2 Why behavioraleconomics and dishonesty? CHAPTER 1: Testing the Simple Model of Rational Crime (SMORC)Get rich cheating .. Tempting people to cheat, the measure of dishonesty .. What we knowversus what we think we know about dishonesty .. Cheating when we can t get caught .. Marketvendors, cab drivers, and cheating the blind .. Fishing and tall tales .. Striking a balancebetween TRUTH and cheating. CHAPTER 2: Fun with the Fudge FactorWhy some things are easier to steal than others .. How companies pave the way for dishonesty .. Token dishonesty.

3 How pledges, commandments, honor codes, and paying with cash cansupport honesty .. But lock your doors just the same .. And a bit about religion, the IRS, andinsurance companies. CHAPTER 2B: GolfMan versus himself .. A four-inch lie .. Whether tis nobler in the mind to take the mulligan ..Schr dinger s scorecard. CHAPTER 3: Blinded by Our Own MotivationsCraze lines, tattoos, and how conflicts of interest distort our perception .. How favors affect ourchoices .. Why full disclosure and other policies aren t fully effective.

4 Imagining lessconflicted compensation .. Disclosure and regulation are the answers or not. CHAPTER 4: Why We Blow It When We re TiredWhy we don t binge in the morning .. Willpower: another limited resource .. Judgment on anempty stomach .. How flexing our cognitive and moral muscles can make us more dishonest ..Self-depletion and a rational theory of temptation. CHAPTER 5: Why Wearing Fakes Makes Us Cheat MoreThe secret language of shoes .. From ermine to Armani and the importance of signaling .. Doknockoffs knock down our standards of honesty?

5 Can gateway fibs lead to monster lies? ..When what the hell wreaks havoc .. There s no such thing as one little white lie .. Halting thedownward spiral. CHAPTER 6: Cheating OurselvesClaws and peacock tails .. When answer keys tell us what we already knew .. Overly optimisticIQ scores .. The Center for Advanced Hindsight .. Being Kubrick .. War heroes and sportsheroes who let us down .. Helping ourselves to a better self-image. CHAPTER 7: Creativity and Dishonesty: We Are All StorytellersThe tales we tell ourselves and how we create stories we can believe.

6 Why creative people arebetter liars .. Redrawing the lines until we see what we want .. When irritation spurs us onward.. How thinking creatively can get us into trouble. CHAPTER 8: Cheating as an Infection: How We Catch the Dishonesty GermCatching the cheating bug .. One bad apple really does spoil the barrel (unless that apple goes tothe University of Pittsburgh) .. How ambiguous rules + group dynamics = cultures of cheating .. A possible road to ethical health. CHAPTER 9: Collaborative Cheating: Why Two Heads Aren t Necessarily Better than OneLessons from an ambiguous boss.

7 All eyes are on you: observation and cheating .. Workingtogether to cheat more? .. Or keeping one another in line .. Cheating charitably .. Buildingtrust and taking liberties .. Playing well with others. CHAPTER 10: A Semioptimistic Ending: People Don t Cheat Enough!Cheer up! Why we should not be too depressed by this book .. True crime .. Cultural differencesin dishonesty .. Politicians or bankers, who cheats more? .. How can we improve our moralhealth? ThanksList of CollaboratorsNotesBibliography and Additional ReadingsIndex About the AuthorAlso by Dan ArielyCreditsCopyrightAbout the PublisherINTRODUCTIONWhy Is Dishonesty So Interesting?

8 There s one way to find out if a man is honest ask him. If he says yes, he is a crook. GROUCHO MARXMy interest in cheating was first ignited in 2002, just a few months after the collapse of Enron. I wasspending the week at some technology-related conference, and one night over drinks I got to meetJohn Perry Barlow. I knew John as the erstwhile lyricist for the Grateful Dead, but during our chat Idiscovered that he had also been working as a consultant for a few companies including case you weren t paying attention in 2001, the basic story of the fall of the Wall Street darlingwent something like this.

9 Through a series of creative accounting tricks helped along by the blindeye of consultants, rating agencies, the company s board, and the now-defunct accounting firm ArthurAndersen, Enron rose to great financial heights only to come crashing down when its actions could nolonger be concealed. Stockholders lost their investments, retirement plans evaporated, thousands ofemployees lost their jobs, and the company went I was talking to John, I was especially interested in his description of his own wishfulblindness. Even though he consulted for Enron while the company was rapidly spinning out of control,he said he hadn t seen anything sinister going on.

10 In fact, he had fully bought into the worldview thatEnron was an innovative leader of the new economy right up until the moment the story was all overthe headlines. Even more surprising, he also told me that once the information was out, he could notbelieve that he failed to see the signs all along. That gave me pause. Before talking to John, I assumedthat the Enron disaster had basically been caused by its three sinister C-level architects (JeffreySkilling, Kenneth Lay, and Andrew Fastow), who together had planned and executed a large-scaleaccounting scheme.